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Never Let Me Go Characters: Kathy H
Kathy H Kathy is the narrator and relates the story to the reader in flashbacks. She is a kind and somewhat passive person who seems to accept her fate. Ruth befriends her when they are quite young by inviting her to play horses and the two become best friends. Kathy is unfailingly loyal to Ruth even if she is sometimes hurt by Ruth’s selfish behaviour and self-aggrandisement. When Kathy tries to teach Ruth a lesson and bring her back down to earth, she invariably ends up feeling bad about it and tries to make up with her friend. Kathy also frequently defends Ruth to anyone else who dares to criticise her. Kathy’s empathetic nature also makes her sympathetic to Tommy, a classmate who gets bullied because he throws a tantrum whenever his feelings are hurt. She tries to comfort him when he flares up after a group of boys let him play along during soccer practice but then don’t pick him for any team. At first she is embarassed when Tommy reacts with gratitude, but they gradually become friends who confide in each other when they start noticing strange occurences at Hailsham which makes them question who and what they really are. Through years of hearing little snippets of information they surmise that they are clones and seem to know that they are destined to die young to provide organs for humans, but seem to feel no need to fight this fate. When Ruth and Tommy become a couple Kathy seems to feel happy for them, but a little left out. She tries to find a nice guy to have sex with, but then her plans get confused when Ruth and Tommy break up. One of Kathy’s classmates says to her: ”And Tommy. I knew it wouldn’t last with Ruth. Well, I suppose your the natural successor” (page 92). This takes Kathy completely by surprise and confuses her. But before she can put any thought into the matter Ruth asks her to help her get back with Tommy (page 95). The possibility that she and Tommy could be a couple never seems to enter Kathy’s mind, even though she “has a way with him he'll listen to he…they've always been able to talk” (page 95). When the students move to the Cottages she has sex with a few guys but doesn’t form any lasting relationships. Her friendship with Ruth becomes strained as Ruth seeks to impress the other people at the Cottages with how wordly-wise she is and the fact that she attended Hailsham. Kathy always harbours the urge to burst Ruth’s bubble but out of loyalty she never contradicts her, although she does talk to her about it in private. Ruth brushes aside Kathy’s concerns and acts as if she is being childish. When Kathy confides her sexual urges, Ruth only confirms her fears when she says that it’s unnatural and that Kathy shouldn’t tell anyone. After the Norfolk trip Tommy confides in Kathy about the animals he’s drawing in case he and Ruth can get a deferral. Tommy confides in Kathy that he’s started drawing so that he and Ruth can have a shot at getting a deferral because he believes they use the art to determine if you’re really in love. He says he’s drawing imaginary animals and Kathy wants to tell him it’s daft and that others will laugh at him again but bites her tongue. When he shows her the drawings she’s at first hesitant to praise them but the longer she looks at them the more she is impressed. She tells him they’re good and she “knew how happy she'd made him (page 173). But when Ruth finds out she subtly manipulates Kathy into laughing about Tommy’s animals. Kathy had been having sex with a guy named Lenny who “suddenly opted to start his training and left. This unsettled me a little, and Ruth had been great about it, watching over me without seeming to make a fuss” (174). One evening they were still chatting about Lenny when Ruth finds the tape. Kathy is so nervous to smooth things over with Ruth that she’s grateful when the conversation shifts to something else. ”I don’t know if the way the conversation went after that was something deliberately controlled by Ruth in the light of her discovery, of if we were headed that way anyway, and that it was only afterwards that Ruth realised she could do with it what she did. At that point, I think I was just relieved she’d finally found the tape and not made a huge scene about it, and so maybe I wasn’t being as careful as I might have been. Because before long, we’d drifted…to laughing about Tommy. At first it had all felt good-natured enough, like we were just being affectionate about him. But then we were laughing about his animals. As I say, I’ve never been sure whether or not Ruth deliberately moved things about to this. To be fair, I can’t even say for certain she was the one who first mentioned the animals. And once we started, I was laughing just as much as she was…I suppose I should have said…that the animals were good. But I didn’t. That was partly because of the tape; and maybe, if I was to be honest, because I was pleased by the notion that Ruth wasn’t taking the animals seriously, and everything that implied” (page 176). Later Ruth lets it slip in front of Tommy that Kathy “finds his animals a complete hoot” (page 178). Kathy feels she “should have found something to say” (page 178) to challenge Ruth. “But I didn’t say or do anything. It was partly, I suppose, that I was so floored by the fact that Ruth would come out with such a trick. I remember a huge tiredness coming over me, a kind of lethargy in the face of the tangled mess before me. It was like being given a maths problem when your brain’s exhausted, and you know there’s some far-off solution, but you can’t work up the energy to give it a go. Something in me just gave up” (page 179). After that Kathy and Tommy’s relationship is not the same anymore. She also sees trouble between Ruth and Tommy. “Though they still made a show of being a couple…I knew them well enought to see they’d grown quite distant from each other” (page 181). So she tries to help them repair the relationship by talking to Ruth about the way she handles Tommy. But Ruth turns it around on her. She knows that her and Tommy’s relationship is falling apart, but she still doesn’t want Kathy and Tommy to be together. Because Kathy confided in her about Lenny Ruth can use this against her but acts as if she does it out of concern. “Kathy, I’ve been thinking this for some time. You’re no fool and you can see maybe me and Tommy, we might not be a couple for ever. That’s no tragedy. We were right for each other once. Whether we always will be, that’s anyone’s guess. And now there’s all this talk, about couples getting deferrals if they can prove, you know, that they’re really right…It’s be completely natural if you’d thought about…what would happen if me and Tommy decided we shouldn’t be together any more. We’re not about to split, don’t get me wrong. But I’d think it was completely normal if you at least wondered about it. Well, Kathy, what you have to realise is that Tommy doesn’t see you like that. He really, really likes you, he thinks you’re really great. But he doesn’t see you like…a proper girlfriend. Besides…you know how Tommy is. He can be fussy…Tommy doesn’t like girls who’ve been…with this person and that” (page 183). After this Kathy feels she needs to leave and decides to become a carer. Because of the somewhat detached way Kathy views the things happening around her while simultaneously being empathetic to others’ feelings, Kathy makes a good carer. She seems not to think about what awaits her after her time as a carer and enjoys her job. When she meets Ruth and Tommy again she does her best to mend fences with Ruth by becoming her carer. After Ruth’s death she and Tommy become a couple and Tommy expresses his regret that it didn’t happen sooner. One day he shows Kathy that he’s still working on his drawings. “I can’t remember what I answered. What I do remember is the strong mix of emotions that engulfed me at that moment. I realised immediately this was Tommy’s way of putting behind us everything that had happened around his drawings back at the Cottages, and I felt relief, gratitude, sheer delight. But was aware too why the animals had emerged again…I could see he was showing me he hadn’t forgotten, even though we’d hardly discussed anything openly he was telling me he wasn’t complacent, that he was busy getting on with his part in the preparations” (page 221). But Kathy also has the same feeling she experiences when they’re having sex, “that we were doing all of this too late; that there’d once been a time for it, but we’d let that go by, and there was something ridiculous, reprehensible even, about the way we were now thinking and planning” (page 221). They are happy for a brief time, but as Tommy regains his strength “the possibility of notice for his fourth donation growing ever more distinct, we knew we couldn’t keep putting things off indefinitely” (page 222). They finally go to Madame and she tells them that there is no such thing as a deferral and that Hailsham was only an experiment to see if it was helpful to raise clones in a more humane way. “Tommy and I couldn’t quite believe that was the end of it…Then Tommy said: ‘So there’s definitely nothing. No deferral, nothing like that.’ ‘No, Tommy. There’s nothing like that. Your life must now run the course that’s been set for it.’ ‘So, what you’re saying, Miss,’ Tommy said, ‘is that everything we did, all the lessons, everything. It was all about what you just told us? There was nothing more to it than that?’ ‘I can see,’ Miss Emily said, ‘that it might look as though you were simply pawns in a game. It can certainly be looked at like that. But think of it. You were lucky pawns.’ ‘It might be just some trend that came and went,’ I said. ‘But for us, it’s our life.’” (page 243). After this Tommy starts to pull away from Kathy and she has to accept it. In the end Kathy seems content with the fate ahead of her, that she will also inevitably become a donor, and consoles herself with thoughts of Hailsham because it was a happy time that no one can ever take from her. “The memories I value most, I don’t see them ever fading. I lost Ruth, then I lost Tommy, but I won’t lose my memories of them” (page 262).